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ICT4D Week 2018

Monday, May 14, 2018

Invest more in ICT skills, DBI boss urges govts

The recently appointed administrator of the DigitalBridge Institute (DBI), Dr. Ikechukwu Adinde, has beckoned on government to
invest more on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills, reports ITRealms.

DBI, ITRealms
gathered prides itself as Nigeria’s foremost ICT capacity building institute,
which is an arm of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).

Speaking at the weekend, Dr. Adinde, canvassed more
investment by governments at all levels in the development of ICT knowledge and
skill.

This, he said, is the only way the country will
maximize its investments in ICT infrastructure. He disclosed this during a
brief engagement with journalists in Abuja at the weekend. According to Adinde,
without concomitant investment in skills and training, the nation cannot
optimally harness the possibilities and potential inherent in the deployment of
infrastructure across the country.

He said emphasis has been on funding of ICT hardware
procurement, stressing that the time has come for a paradigm shift in which ICT
funding should be spread across hardware, software and skills acquisition
(training).

“There are two ways to funding ICT: infrastructure
side and soft side (skills and knowledge). On the hard side which is the
infrastructure side, it is easy to perceive the investment that is being made
and often times that’s what the government talks about (buying computers,
equipment, installing gadgets etc.), but the most important part is the skills
and the knowledge that people need to harness the potential in those hardware
investments.

“We had made a case sometime in 2016 at the capacity
building symposium organised by the International Telecommunications Union
(ITU) that the investments in USPF (universal service provision fund) across
Africa instead of being channeled wholly and exclusively to ICT infrastructure
should be dedicated to ICT skills development, in that if someone is investing
$10million in ICT infrastructure, 10 per cent of the money should go for ICT
skills development especially targeted at the youths now commonly called the
millennials.

“They are the ones who will use the infrastructure
to innovate, create and develop the things that will make the future happen,
but as long as we don’t make that investment then it means that you’ll put a
piece of ICT equipment in an office and nobody is using it because the skills
are not there”, he said.

He explained it using a telephone. “A typical phone,
for example, can do a lot for us but because the knowledge of the use of the
phone is not available, meanwhile we’ve invested a lot of money buying this
device, we limit ourselves to just making calls and sending text messages”.

According to him, there’s a critical need to invest
in building ICT capacity for the young people and that’s why “DBI continues to
innovate programmes that target the young people so that we fulfil our mandate
in that area”.

He explained that their training focuses on both
young persons and those who are advanced in age but wish to upscale their ICT
skills. “We have young people who have just finished from secondary school and
are looking to pursue a career in ICT. They join our National Innovation
Diploma programme, which is a two-year programme (Telecommunications
Technology, Multimedia Technology, Networking and Systems Security and Computer
Hardware and Software Engineering), after which they can move on or if they
want to continue at a higher level they can pursue a degree in higher
institutions.”

“We have people with degrees who come into the
programme because the course is practical based, where the students are mostly
in the lab. We have computer science graduates who are currently taking this
programme (in Lagos and in Kano). The reason they’re in the programme is
because they want to get hands-on experience from our labs and workshops. We
also have professors, PhD holders and those in the public sectors with us; our
programmes attract participants from across a wide range of the market,” he
said.